Licorice Angelheart, the 300-pound star of Creeping Aphrodite, is kind, funny, and incredibly smart. Her universe, however, bounded by the town of Honeydung, is greedy, superficial, and cruel. Although Licorice worships food and lover her folds - "It takes a lot of groceries to maintain this glorious body," she brags - her alcoholic, surgically enhanced stepmother, her uncaring father (who will only communicate with her through his law associate), and the grotesque townspeople daily batter her sense of self-worth. A resident of Shreveport, Louisiana, Rice uses visceral language and native Southern knowledge to create a Honeydung where the most comforting places are the Habitual Victual grocery store and the Happy Hangover bar.
The myth of Aphrodite, whom Licorice describes as "creep[ing] through the world spying on people to pick her lovers like a succubus," is appropriate to Licorice. All of her friends are in love with her despite - or because of - her girth: "Big Hands" Miracle, the lesbian who wants to protect and serve her; Stanley, the bartender who lovingly taunts her; even the Associate, the paternal proxy who conveys her father's disapproval. Even though they are cartoonish, these characters are real in Rice's bizarro world. If Judy Blume wrote a screenplay for John Waters, it might be Creeping Aphrodite.
What makes this novel so great is not the plot, but the pervasive, perverted imagination that makes it run. The main character's size, her stint as a hospital worker, and her stepmother's horrid friends provide lots of opportunities for twisted fun, and Rice takes every one. The addictive pull of Creeping Aphrodite is how it hovers on the edge of being completely offensive - and gets away with it because of Rice's compassion towards her subjects. Her creation is as wonderfully over the top as Licorice's tent-sized fuscia dress.
Which is not to call Aphrodite flawless. The ending, in which Licorice finds storybook love with a man who loves her, fat or thin, is anticlimatic. Licorice's eventual soulmate is not a very complex character, and he stands in with creepy obviousness for her absent father. Perhaps to make up for the letdown, Rice steps in, directly addressing the reader with her own diet stories in a butt-kicking coda.
The novel's other flaws are term-paperish extracts from Licorice's ongoing master's thesis, extreme language, and word games. Although the verbiage is appropriate for Licorice and the third-person narrator who seems to share her consciousness, at times it begs forgiveness and a little skimming.
Creeping Aphrodite
Charlotte Rice
Tantrum (2000)
$12
On the margins of Amy's impressions is flesh: Gavin's pale legs, Gina's dirty hair, Robin's heavy breasts, her own calloused feet, and a scarred stomach. She views her body as a suspicious foreign object. During a layover on her flight to Wisconsin, she visits a photo booth, and this moment sets up the themes - painful repetition, lack of control, and a distanced self-analysis - that will define Amy's experience throughout the novel:
"I smiled.
"I got tired of smiling, and the camera flashed.
"Four times this happened. The strip of black-and-white pictures that came wet out of the slot was a strip of identical faces, wrinkles between the eyebrows, thin lips pressed together. My hair blended into the dark curtains behind me so my faces were white balloons, the faces of children in chemotherapy."
At one point, however, the novel seems to point out its own shortcoming. Amy, after talking to an amnesiac woman, thinks, "In my head, too, the same memories looped and looped, and there was no telling what I was forgetting." The book's structure reinforces this sense of looping, and sometimes the haunting correlation between childhood and present is all too neat. One wonders what has been left out, where the fabric of memory has been taken to fit a very thin frame.
Green's novel might be more convincing if it weren't confined to Amy's own mind. The straightforward interior narrative undercuts the element of suspense. Since we are privy to all of Amy's thoughts and little else, we are curious about the events to which she alludes, but we are confident that all will be revealed. Her most carefully guarded memory, when finally exposed, seems too neatly symbolic, an artificial pearl. Furthermore, it is hard to believe that Amy would have so few memories of home besides those of her proto-gay alienation. If there were good associations as well, perhaps her pain, rather than blending into the background, would stand out in sharp relief. Grades: Creeping Aphrodite: A-; Half-Moon Scar: B